Commericial artist by day, flying by night

It's something of a ritual. You go in your favorite bar or restaurant and, pausing at a table in the breezeway, leaf through piles of flyers advertising the coming weekend's entertainment: A DJ from the UK, a party at the beach, a stage show about an anthropomorphic eyeball. As varied as the events are, so too are the handbills that advertise them. The one thing they have in common is that they showcase their designers' talents in a way few other media can.

"Flyers allow you to try things that you might not try otherwise," said local designer Issa (陳彥鳴). By day he works for a commercial magazine, but after hours he goes to work creating many of the glossy give-aways picked up by patrons of Room 18, Luxy and the former TeXound, 2nd Floor and Opium Den.

Club owners and party promoters rely on Issa and a dozen other well-known local designers to stir interest in an event. Regardless of how much money has been spent on a party or concert or who is headlining, a well-crafted flyer has the ability to create the "cool" factor. By passing them among friends, it generates the most potent advertising all: word-of-mouth.

Of course, this is nothing new. Handbills have been distributed to advertise live music events since printing became widely available. It reached something of an art form in the late 1960s with psychedelic rock bands producing wildly imaginative posters and flyers that, 30 years later, command high prices on eBay.

A limited edition, hand-colored reprint of a Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters Acid Test poster will cost you some US$6,000. A small handbill for a Dec. 22, 1967 concert with The Doors and Iron Butterfly has an asking price of US$1,200. Also in 1967, Gary Grimshaw designed a small poster for the Dec. 10 John Sinclair Freedom Rally at the University of Michigan. Sinclair was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. The subsequent rally drew such notables as Alan Ginsberg, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. An extant original of Grimshaw's poster, with its illustration of Sinclair toking a joint, is now worth US$1,200. A handbill for the 1972 follow-up "John is Free!" concert will set you back US$400.

These are advertisements that have transcended their use to become historical documents and cultural markers. While the flyers being produced for events in Taiwan aren't widely considered collector's items, it may only be a matter of time until they are.

Issa reckons that Taiwan's flyer culture started some seven or eight years ago when the nation's godfather of electronic music, DJ @llen, teamed up with designer Tico (陳天授) of 54FF Studio to produce more flavorful flyers. Up to then, Issa recalls, most handbills were single-sided Xerox copies which provided only the event's date, time and location, with perhaps a drawing or picture pasted on. As computer design programs and printing processes gained ground -- and, indeed, as the local electronic music scene gained popularity -- the flyers became not just a way to let people know about an event, but to get them excited about it with brightly colored, sleek visuals printed on glossy paper. "They're half ad, half art," Issa says.

It's a subject about which he has done a lot of thinking. He's even penned an article about the philosophy of flyer design for electronic music review Web site, Upstairs.com. Because flyers are so often advertising music events, he explains, they allow designers to tap into their deepest creative resources. "Any powerful or unconstrained style idea or design esthetic can be put on a flyer."